The Gumilev Mystique

The Gumilev Mystique PDF Author: Mark Bassin
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501703390
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the legacy of the historian, ethnographer, and geographer Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev (1912–1992) has attracted extraordinary interest in Russia and beyond. The son of two of modern Russia’s greatest poets, Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova, Gumilev spent thirteen years in Stalinist prison camps, and after his release in 1956 remained officially outcast and professionally shunned. Out of the tumult of perestroika, however, his writings began to attract attention and he himself became a well-known and popular figure. Despite his highly controversial (and often contradictory) views about the meaning of Russian history, the nature of ethnicity, and the dynamics of interethnic relations, Gumilev now enjoys a degree of admiration and adulation matched by few if any other public intellectual figures in the former Soviet Union. He is freely compared to Albert Einstein and Karl Marx, and his works today sell millions of copies and have been adopted as official textbooks in Russian high schools. Universities and mountain peaks alike are named in his honor, and a statue of him adorns a prominent thoroughfare in a major city. Leading politicians, President Vladimir Putin very much included, are unstinting in their deep appreciation for his legacy, and one of the most important foreign-policy projects of the Russian government today is clearly inspired by his particular vision of how the Eurasian peoples formed a historical community. In The Gumilev Mystique, Mark Bassin presents an analysis of this remarkable phenomenon. He investigates the complex structure of Gumilev’s theories, revealing how they reflected and helped shape a variety of academic as well as political and social discourses in the USSR, and he traces how his authority has grown yet greater across the former Soviet Union. The themes he highlights while untangling Gumilev’s complicated web of influence are critical to understanding the political, intellectual, and ethno-national dynamics of Russian society from the age of Stalin to the present day.

The Gumilev Mystique

The Gumilev Mystique PDF Author: Mark Bassin
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501703390
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Get Book Here

Book Description
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the legacy of the historian, ethnographer, and geographer Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev (1912–1992) has attracted extraordinary interest in Russia and beyond. The son of two of modern Russia’s greatest poets, Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova, Gumilev spent thirteen years in Stalinist prison camps, and after his release in 1956 remained officially outcast and professionally shunned. Out of the tumult of perestroika, however, his writings began to attract attention and he himself became a well-known and popular figure. Despite his highly controversial (and often contradictory) views about the meaning of Russian history, the nature of ethnicity, and the dynamics of interethnic relations, Gumilev now enjoys a degree of admiration and adulation matched by few if any other public intellectual figures in the former Soviet Union. He is freely compared to Albert Einstein and Karl Marx, and his works today sell millions of copies and have been adopted as official textbooks in Russian high schools. Universities and mountain peaks alike are named in his honor, and a statue of him adorns a prominent thoroughfare in a major city. Leading politicians, President Vladimir Putin very much included, are unstinting in their deep appreciation for his legacy, and one of the most important foreign-policy projects of the Russian government today is clearly inspired by his particular vision of how the Eurasian peoples formed a historical community. In The Gumilev Mystique, Mark Bassin presents an analysis of this remarkable phenomenon. He investigates the complex structure of Gumilev’s theories, revealing how they reflected and helped shape a variety of academic as well as political and social discourses in the USSR, and he traces how his authority has grown yet greater across the former Soviet Union. The themes he highlights while untangling Gumilev’s complicated web of influence are critical to understanding the political, intellectual, and ethno-national dynamics of Russian society from the age of Stalin to the present day.

Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples

Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples PDF Author: Adrienne Edgar
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501762966
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples examines the racialization of identities and its impact on mixed couples and families in Soviet Central Asia. In marked contrast to its Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union celebrated mixed marriages among its diverse ethnic groups as a sign of the unbreakable friendship of peoples and the imminent emergence of a single "Soviet people." Yet the official Soviet view of ethnic nationality became increasingly primordial and even racialized in the USSR's final decades. In this context, Adrienne Edgar argues, mixed families and individuals found it impossible to transcend ethnicity, fully embrace their complex identities, and become simply "Soviet." Looking back on their lives in the Soviet Union, ethnically mixed people often reported that the "official" nationality in their identity documents did not match their subjective feelings of identity, that they were unable to speak "their own" native language, and that their ambiguous physical appearance prevented them from claiming the nationality with which they most identified. In all these ways, mixed couples and families were acutely and painfully affected by the growth of ethnic primordialism and by the tensions between the national and supranational projects in the Soviet Union. Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples is based on more than eighty in-depth oral history interviews with members of mixed families in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, along with published and unpublished Soviet documents, scholarly and popular articles from the Soviet press, memoirs and films, and interviews with Soviet-era sociologists and ethnographers.

The Road to Unfreedom

The Road to Unfreedom PDF Author: Timothy Snyder
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0525574484
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of On Tyranny comes a stunning new chronicle of the rise of authoritarianism from Russia to Europe and America. “A brilliant analysis of our time.”—Karl Ove Knausgaard, The New Yorker With the end of the Cold War, the victory of liberal democracy seemed final. Observers declared the end of history, confident in a peaceful, globalized future. This faith was misplaced. Authoritarianism returned to Russia, as Vladimir Putin found fascist ideas that could be used to justify rule by the wealthy. In the 2010s, it has spread from east to west, aided by Russian warfare in Ukraine and cyberwar in Europe and the United States. Russia found allies among nationalists, oligarchs, and radicals everywhere, and its drive to dissolve Western institutions, states, and values found resonance within the West itself. The rise of populism, the British vote against the EU, and the election of Donald Trump were all Russian goals, but their achievement reveals the vulnerability of Western societies. In this forceful and unsparing work of contemporary history, based on vast research as well as personal reporting, Snyder goes beyond the headlines to expose the true nature of the threat to democracy and law. To understand the challenge is to see, and perhaps renew, the fundamental political virtues offered by tradition and demanded by the future. By revealing the stark choices before us--between equality or oligarchy, individuality or totality, truth and falsehood--Snyder restores our understanding of the basis of our way of life, offering a way forward in a time of terrible uncertainty.

Civilization

Civilization PDF Author: Giovanni Borgognone
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793645833
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Civilizations, or rather narratives about civilizations, matter, not only as research subjects in textbooks, literary and scientific essays, but also in politics. This seems to be the case in "civilizational states" such as China, Russia, Turkey and Syria. Also in Western countries, in recent decades, the notion of civilization has often been used in public discourse: political parties and leaders have referred in particular to the need to protect Western civilization, calling in this regard for policies to restrict immigration from Muslim countries. In 2022 the narrative on civilization was used to legitimize the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The studies in this collected volume reconstruct how civilizational paradigms and narratives have been used to explain political relations, to define the global order, to justify attempts to gain hegemony over particular geopolitical areas, and to make predictions on global developments in specific times of crisis. In particular, this book analyzes the concepts of civilization as they have been used in the intellectual and political discourse in periods particularly critical for global relations and for the consolidation or contestation of the West’s dominant role in international, national politics and academic discourse.

Resignification of Borders: Eurasianism and the Russian World

Resignification of Borders: Eurasianism and the Russian World PDF Author: Nina Friess
Publisher: Frank & Timme GmbH
ISBN: 3732905705
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Eurasianism has proved to be an unexpectedly diverse and highly self-reflexive concept. By transforming the way we describe the Eurasian landmass, it also resignifies our field of studies and its disciplinary boundaries. In this process, Eurasianism itself is subject to a constant resignification. The present volume builds on this notion while pursuing an innovative approach to Eurasianism. The authors advance the well-established positions that view Eurasianism as a historical intellectual movement or as an ideology of Russian neo-Imperialism, and proceed to unpack an innovative vision of Eurasianism as a process of renegotiating cultural values and identity narratives—in and beyond Russia. This procedural approach provides deeper insight into the operationality of the identity narratives and shifting semantics of Eurasianism in its relation to the Russian World.

Diversity and Empires

Diversity and Empires PDF Author: Sophie Rose
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000893375
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Examining diversity as a fundamental reality of empire, this book explores European colonial empires, both terrestrial and maritime, to show how they addressed the questions of how to manage diversity. These questions range from the local to the supra-regional, and from the management of people to that of political and judicial systems. Taking an intersectional approach incorporating categories such as race, religion, subjecthood, and social and legal status, the contributions of the volume show how old and new modes of creating social difference took shape in an increasingly globalized early modern world, and what contemporary legacies these ‘diversity formations’ left behind. This volume shows diversity and imperial projects to be both contentious and mutually constitutive: on the one hand, the conditions of empire created divisions between people through official categorizations (such as racial classifications and designations of subjecthood) and through discriminately applied extractive policies, from taxation to slavery. On the other hand, imperial subjects, communities, and polities within and adjacent to the empire asserted themselves through a diverse range of affiliations and identities that challenged any notion of a unilateral, universal imperial authority. This book highlights the multidimensionality and interconnectedness of diversity in imperial settings and will be useful reading to students and scholars of the history of colonial empires, global history, and race.

The Politics of Eurasianism

The Politics of Eurasianism PDF Author: Mark Bassin
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 178660163X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
In the course of Vladimir Putin’s third presidential term, many of the doctrines and ideas associated with Eurasianism have moved to the center of public political discourses in Russia. Eurasianism, both Russian and non-Russian, is politically active —influential and contested— in debates about identity, popular culture or foreign policy narratives. Deploying a variety of theoretical frameworks and perspectives, the essays in this volume work together to shed light on both Eurasianism’s plasticity and contemporary weight, and examine how its tropes and discourses are appropriated, interpreted, modulated and deployed politically, by national groups, oppositional forces (left or right), prominent intellectuals, artists, and last but not least, government elites. In doing so, this collection addresses essential themes and questions currently shaping the Post-Soviet world and beyond.

Contemporary Issues in International Relations

Contemporary Issues in International Relations PDF Author: Mehmet Emin Erendor
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527547973
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
Recent regional and global crises have changed the structure of international relations and cause countries to be inconsistent in their policies. Examples of these include the protest demonstrations and political crises which started in the Middle East and African countries in 2010 known as the ‘Arab Spring’, which had a major effect on Syria, and the movement towards Brexit. These emerging regional and global crises have highlighted the shortcomings of the discipline of international relations and the need for a new, detailed study to be conducted. The topics in this book have been carefully selected in order to provide a more objective assessment of the recent and ongoing problems of the international community. This volume will be a valuable resource for graduate, undergraduate and post-graduate students, academics and researchers in the areas of cyber security, international law, international organizations, and international relations.

The Russia Anxiety

The Russia Anxiety PDF Author: Mark B. Smith
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190886056
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
Russia is not unknowable--and its past might offer hints into its future and place in the world, one that reaches beyond crisis and confrontation

Is Russia Fascist?

Is Russia Fascist? PDF Author: Marlene Laruelle
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501754149
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
In Is Russia Fascist?, Marlene Laruelle argues that the charge of "fascism" has become a strategic narrative of the current world order. Vladimir Putin's regime has increasingly been accused of embracing fascism, supposedly evidenced by Russia's annexation of Crimea, its historical revisionism, attacks on liberal democratic values, and its support for far-right movements in Europe. But at the same time Russia has branded itself as the world's preeminent antifascist power because of its sacrifices during the Second World War while it has also emphasized how opponents to the Soviet Union in Central and Eastern Europe collaborated with Nazi Germany. Laruelle closely analyzes accusations of fascism toward Russia, soberly assessing both their origins and their accuracy. By labeling ideological opponents as fascist, regardless of their actual values or actions, geopolitical rivals are able to frame their own vision of the world and claim the moral high ground. Through a detailed examination of the Russian domestic scene and the Kremlin's foreign policy rationales, Laruelle disentangles the foundation for, meaning, and validity of accusations of fascism in and around Russia. Is Russia Fascist? shows that the efforts to label opponents as fascist is ultimately an attempt to determine the role of Russia in Europe's future.